When I was on doorsteps campaigning for my partner Owen Lewis in Monmouthshire, one of the things that surprised me most was how much better I got on with people who were planning on voting Reform UK than I thought I would.
I wrote a bit about my views on Reform UK on a previous blog, and how I feel that a major part of their appeal is not based especially concretely on their policies. Nevertheless, I had presumed (perhaps unfairly so) that people with those kinds of views would be types that I would really struggle to talk to, people I'd feel were a bit racist, people whose approach to life would be the complete antithesis of mine. What I found was the opposite - although many of these people did express opinions that I felt a little dodgy, I often found them to be quite interesting people, and their views to be ones that I respected.
My partner's campaign was fundamentally about the rights of the most vulnerable people, and for that reason I felt quite reticent about getting too deep into conversations about immigration or about refugees or asylum seekers with people sympathetic to Reform's message. If these topics did come up, I would normally either divert the subject to people drowning in the channel, the reasons why people make these crossings in the first place, or agreeing that there needs to be a better and more fair system (which is what I believe, even if my idea of what is a fair system might differ quite strongly from theirs). This was not in the interests of trying to avoid the subject, far from it; more that I felt that it would be more conducive to finding something in common with the people I was talking to, and a lot of the time this was a lot more easy than I'd expected.
One man in particular, who'd been planning on voting Reform as a protest vote, stuck in my mind. He told me quite a bit about his life and his frustrations, very much of which I was very sympathetic to. I didn't have the impression that he was especially right-wing or especially anti-woke - more that, just like me, he was absolutely fed up with the Tories and didn't have the slightest bit of faith in the Labour Party to deal with the myriad of problems they'd caused, and that he therefore wanted to send a message.
The conversation reaffirmed to me something that I've felt for a while - which is that irrespective of the political choices we might make, most of the time the problems we face in the world are exactly the same as everyone else's. It's also true that politicians manipulate this for their own ends. I think a good example of this is to look at how much the matter of the NHS was used by both the Leave and Remain campaigns around the 2016 EU referendum. Some people were led to believe that leaving the EU would benefit the NHS, some were led to believe that remaining in the EU would. The common factor was that pretty much everyone wanted to help the NHS; this ought to have been something the UK public could agree and unite on, but politicians cynically used it to make people fight amongst themselves. The outcome was that we were stuck with a Government that was intent on destroying the NHS, and more importantly this would still have happened had Remain won the referendum. The whole NHS conversation was an absolute scam and was always going to be, right from the very beginning.
Scams are horrible things to experience, and most of us will fall victim to a scam at some point in our lifetime. There are certainly things we can do to protect ourselves from scams, just as there are things we can do to protect ourselves from being raped or from having burglars break into our homes. But the important thing to remember is that none of these protections are infallible, and that if you happen to fall victim to a crime it is absolutely not your fault. I feel this way about people who vote in ways that cause them additional harm. The common perception of people who vote for parties like this are that they're bigoted, racist or just stupid. I'll confess to having expressed myself views to this effect in the past; it's something that is quite a common belief here on the left.
I don't believe that these kinds of people are stupid, but I do think that a lot of the time they aren't as informed about politics as perhaps they should be. This raises the question as to whose responsibility it is to inform oneself about politics. I am fortunate enough to be someone who does have quite a lot of information about what's going on; I've been writing this blog since I was 17 and first got into going to social justice protests, and I've used it to network a lot online with people, educate myself and inform others. But this didn't just come out of nowhere. Even before I started writing about politics, I had lived with people from multiple different countries, been to school with people from all kinds of class backgrounds and had a fairly clear shape of how I viewed the world. My earliest blogs are quite embarrassing for me to look back on now - naturally as I've grown older and matured my perspective on these topics has become a bit less black-and-white - but on the whole my view of the world hasn't particularly shifted since the time I started doing this fourteen years ago. For my opinion to change, I need to see really good reasons that are in line with my understanding of morality.
If you're someone whose experience of the world is radically different to mine, someone who hasn't been as privileged as I have or met the sorts of people that I've met, it is natural that you may have come to different conclusions to mine - or, more likely, not to have come to very thought-out conclusions at all. The way that political discourse is presented in our media is exceptionally convoluted and difficult to follow. I believe that this is done on purpose so that Governments can get away with more things and it's harder to consistently hold them to account for it, but as years pass it makes the population increasingly susceptible to being groomed by the extreme right. This is what I think has happened with the rise of UKIP and now the rise of Reform - people are rightly, rationally and intelligently crying out for a change in the system, but their lack of reliable political information results in cynical politicians like Nigel Farage being able to take advantage of them. I would view anyone who becomes a target of this to be as vulnerable as anyone who is groomed in any other way.
To the man who was considering voting Reform, I told him that our local candidate had failed to turn up to all hustings bar one, so how could he be relied upon to care or know about local issues? I also made clear that these kinds of politicians are not actually anti-establishment - they're just very practiced in the art of appearing so, when in reality they are as wealthy and connected as the two main parties. The man grudgingly admitted that this was probably true, and I left thinking that he might vote for my partner - naturally I don't know if he did in the end. I've had other conversations like this, and some of them went better than others. But the whole experience did affirm to me that dismissing these kinds of voters as racist bigots causes more harm than good. Reform UK relies on the fact that the left is going to do that - we need to prove them wrong, be willing to have these conversations and be prepared to listen to the problems these people are experiencing. Fascism can only thrive in the absence of a valid alternative.
No comments:
Post a Comment